Category Archives: Mental Optimization

All of us are naturally curious about our own selves. When someone who knew us when, someone older, tells us a story about something we did when we were too young to remember it, we are raptly attentive.

If it were not for the culturally ubiquitous time pressure, we would have the same curiosity if offered a searchlight method to see more deeply into our own mind than ever before. Here we offer just such a searchlight.

This posting is a brief exploration into the architecture of inner experience and offers tools to look into your inner Self, through observation and experience. Why bother? Because in order to get into the two higher, most effective states of consciousness — the Observer State, where we can really see what is going on inside ourselves rather than being puppeteered by software in our heads, and the Flow state (Zone), where we are spontaneously doing everything just right — we need to become experts in the empirical study of our own minds and inner life.

What Is the Architecture of Our Inner Life?

Carl Jung defined the four functions of consciousness as perception, feelings, intellect and intuition — the latter referred to in day-to-day life as “hunches”. These are four kinds of events that can go on in consciousness.

Within consciousness, what we experience first is something inside that motivates us and moves us toward or away from something. Those are feelings. Instincts — hardwired genetic carryovers inherited before birth — are partly responsible for some or all of our feelings. The rest arise from motivations we accumulated during our lives, stuff we learned or decided to want or not want as a result of our experiences since birth.

So what are these things you call your thoughts, your feelings, your hunches, your perceptions? Consider, or reconsider, all of the experiences you have had of your own mind, your own inner life.

When I watch what goes on inside of me, it often starts with a feeling that is also somehow an image at the same time. Another part of me then takes that feeling/image and interprets it as a conscious thought — putting names, categorizations, and other specific recognizable details onto the original amorphous feeling/image.

I think that’s what a thought is. An interpreted feeling/image. Diverging from Jung, I posit that thoughts and feelings are the same thing, at different stages of development.

Thoughts add details to feelings/images, turning them into specifications, bringing out additional information that had somehow been packed into the feeling/image.

Possibly feelings are the most substantial and primary actor, coming out of our most intimate connection with our self, and arising to be transmuted into intuitions and/or thoughts and/or emotions and/or images/visions.

Perceptions coming in from the “outside” accompanied by an equal stream of feelings from “inside” suggests that feelings are another sense, like seeing and hearing. In which case, we simply perceive, and the rest of the functions are what evolves from our perceptions. In other words, feelings are inner perceptions, and what we call sense perceptions are outer perceptions. Inner and outer perceptions are the raw stuff of experience, and as we turn them over in our minds, those perceptions turn into thoughts and/or intuitions.

I suggest that perceptions evolve into what Jung classified as thoughts (intellect) and/or hunches (intuition). Outer perceptions — the five physical senses — are what Jung called “perceptions” — and the inner perceptions are what Jung called “feelings”. In my own experience, the raw stuff of my inner life is comprised of feeling/image arisings that I then articulate internally as thoughts, with either words or not, or observe as hunches, without inner words.

Intellect and intuition have always been seen as similar functions. Intellect reaches new conclusions step by effortful step. Intuition gets there in one leap, involuntarily, all by itself. Sometimes when the intuition or hunch is particularly credible and important and came out of nowhere, we call it inspiration, suggesting help from some outside invisible source.

The Searchlight to Our Inner Self

We need maps to study consciousness. We also need meditation to concentrate on seeing what really goes on inside by understanding the basic building blocks of all inner experience — thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and perceptions.

Try this. Find five minutes when you can’t be interrupted and there is nothing dragging you away like a deadline. You might not find time to try this until the weekend, so leave yourself a note somewhere you’ll see it Saturday or Sunday morning.

Sit with your eyes closed and back straight, with your head drawn up toward the ceiling. First, still the mind by experiencing your breath going in and out, without trying to control the breath in any way. After a half-dozen breath cycles or whenever you feel as if your mind is relatively still, begin the exercise.

Now simply watch for what happens at the very beginning of a thought or feeling. A thought or a feeling is going to arise. You are in a state of concentrated sharp attention and the game is to see that arising as quickly as possible, identify what it is, and be able to remember the experience of it as accurately as possible.

This is not as easy as it sounds because we tend to get so instantly caught up in the thought or feeling we forget that we are doing this exercise. That is, until through exercises like this, we find that we have gained true control of our minds in a gradual process that we get better and better at over time. By looking inside, we can begin to cut through dogma and other people’s beliefs, and see for ourselves who we are in our inner worlds.

As we leap into 2019, with clear intentions and resolve, let’s keep this visualization in the forefront of our minds to guide our thoughts and actions:

Visualize the wholeUniverse as one thingEvery individual of every speciesEvery ideaEvery eventEvery moment of timeEvery perceptEvery lump of matter and energyAll parts of one thing*

Then, each day, realizing your connection with the Universe, play your hand as best you can:

You are a Musician, harmonize. You are an Actor, detach. You are Real, don’t pretend. You are in Time, don’t hurry.*

May we all reopen our minds to the existence of all possibilities, as we rediscover the unique experiment that Nature has designed uniquely for each and every one of us on our branch of the Tree of Life.

This blog takes a shortened form optimized for Acceleritis™ conditions

Listening to you readers, I have enjoyed writing this blog more than ever. Everyone I’ve talked to has said it is something totally different and therefore worth reading. Thank you all again for the encouragement.

Habit is the biggest obstacle to innovation and adaptability. The number of repetitions in our ingrained mental habits is in the millions by age 30. Each repetition reinforces many synapses thus increasing their automaticity. This is your challenge in breaking out of mental ruts, which is something you must do if you aspire to Flow state. And something you must do simply to innovate and adapt yourself and your company/organization to an accelerated treadmill of inputs, questions, challenges, and opportunities.

Imagination is the best tool we have and the one that is the most fun to use. Use of imagination regenerates synapses that have fallen into disuse and dials back the automaticity of the ones you use all the time.

Take your company, for example. Imagine the wildest scenarios you can — radical changes in partnerships, a totally different pricing model, an impossible dream of a new product you’d love to have — you make it up. See if this mental exercise doesn’t give you some imaginative yet prudent immediate actions. I bet it will.

Do the same for yourself. Think the unthinkable. Every seven years every cell in your body is different, the old ones are gone. We are a new self every moment. Daydream your near-term and far-term future, knowing you are purposely being unrealistic and perhaps grandiose — it’s allowed because it’s only an exercise.

2 more incredibly easy and vitally important experiments you can perform surreptitiously

Experiment 3: Make the Eye Naked

Again, all of these experiments relate to level setting reality. This one is primarily visual. You cannot trust your senses to be exactly reporting what is out there, because there are mechanisms that convert light and sound waves and other inbound media into chemical and electrical impulses and then produce an abstracted report to consciousness. We know that atoms are mostly empty space yet everything looks solid and light does not go through most of it. Solidity is therefore an illusion. What else, then, is also an illusion?

Besides the illusory nature of our senses to begin with, the brain has reducing valve systems in the Reticular Activating Structure (RAS) and other systems that have been survival-relevant as evidenced by our race having survived. Acceleritis™ is a very recent (6000-year) condition in the 4,000,000-year descending of human beings from very clever apes. Nature does not change that fast in 6000 years, hence the condition being so challenging to us living through it.

One of the systems in the brain is the gestalting system. This system is why we tend to see wholes even when presented with fragments or diverse objects at varying distances from us. The gestalting (or whole-ing) system is also affected by Acceleritis in that all perceptual systems are conditioned to sense what the user expects — we see what we expect to see, we hear what we expect to hear, taste what we expect to taste, etc. Acceleritis does this because it is just another means of simplifying things. Another reducing valve. We subconsciously say to ourselves that we cannot afford the time to navel gaze about irrelevant subjects.

In this modern trance, when we look out at the world we think we see the box that is the universe, and objects in that box of third-party space that is the materialist view of the universe. We have internalized that view — the box — into the mental frame through the gestalting system. Yet if you were to be honest about the raw stuff of what you are seeing when you make the effort to look out and beat the gestalting system, and to honestly report to yourself what you see whenever you look out your eyes is more of a cloud without edges but that is wider than it is high, kind of runs off at the corners, but you don’t see anything box-like.

So let’s try it now.

(1) Simply don’t move your body or your eyes right away but start to look carefully out at what you see right now.

(2) After a moment you can move your eyes but not your body.

(3) Then you can move your body but continue to put all your attention through your eyes.

(4) Then let your attention come back into your self. Give this sequence of four steps a minute, or whatever, before you come back to reading further.

What did you see? If you were waking up with amnesia of even being a human being, what would your eyes be showing you?

This visual soup view that you are now seeing or may have briefly seen before the gestalting program wore you out, convinced many early consciousness researchers that empirically, if they wanted to be honest with themselves, the universe appears to be two types of experiences, two manifestations overlaid over one another, two ways of seeing that overlap three-dimensionally over one another and are always both there:

The sense of being in a box-like universe with lots of 90° angles — this is really a product of the mind along with the eyes

The sense of being in a visual soup of some kind, where if one is far enough into this view suppressing the gestalting system, the most intense things that one sees are other eyes looking back*, wherever in the soup they appear. This is the raw view from the eyes.

This raw view is a much more conducive frame of mind for an individual opening her/his mind to the existence of all possibilities, because the box view is packed with hidden assumptions about the nature of reality.

After 72 hours of remembering from time to time to see this way, please record your observations for yourself, and again, if you don’t mind sharing, you can also post as comments below, anonymously or otherwise. The objective is the greatest shared knowledge. If you do post comments, please make sure the reader knows which experiment is involved. Thanks!

Experiment 4: Look for Secret Messages

Now in the visual soup mode of seeing, try on (see if you can get yourself to believe that it is conceivably true) the hypothesis that all of us are connected in this consciousness visual soup we are all embedded in — we are in a sort of bubble rather than a box. And as we move through the world through doors or otherwise, we go from one bubble into another, sharing each bubble with other inhabitants at that time, and occasionally we get to have alone space to take it all in.

Experimental hypothesis for another time: individuals are able to conceive more things as being possible when seeing in the soup/bubble mode than when they are seeing in the box mode.

This experiment is to be open to possible paranormal experiences in the next 72 hours. You have hopped into your new Ferrari toy — this mind of yours whose belief-shackles you have just burst free from. You no longer assume anything without hard scientific proof. You yourself are worthy of using your own experience, the evidence of your senses although inherently imperfect (you can by maintaining Observer state clarify your senses somewhat), to make your own evaluation of what the universe is, what reality is, what it all means. This next 72 hours is the experimental phase. At the end of that time you can decide whether to continue in this mode indefinitely, or return to your previously scheduled program.

Pay specific attention to hunches, including little signals of objection that are easy to ignore and then you are messed up. Keep a written record in one little book you can easily carry. Review after the first 72 hours and see if these mind-tricks might be worth cultivating further.

Clairvoyance or the sudden suspicion that something specific is happening, has happened or (precognition) will happen. Pay attention to things as little as predicting who is calling when the phone rings. Keep track, write it down.

Seeming to know what someone else is thinking or about to say. Make a note.

As previously reported, science has proven that these ESP phenomena are real. Why not cash in on them yourself? J In the sense of taking full advantage of whatever talents you have to make your life even better than it is now. Making you more capable of helping other people and feeling how good that feels.

All you have to do is to drop the wall you have put up and then go with the flow.

Best to all,

Bill

*Remember to do this “looking experiment” in a meeting. The gestalting program over-ridden, your naked eyes will tend to get more information from the eyes part of the visual bubble; those little patches on the picture will seem to have more energy, aliveness, than the rest of the visual field. You may also see someone look back and feel that they are looking right into you, so prepare yourself for the shock of that moment; have your best cool face in place already. Because you as a primate human get about 70% of your action-trusted information from looking, this eye experiment is one the quicker ways to get yourself back into Observer state when you have slipped out into EOP.

2 Incredibly easy and vitally important experiments you can perform surreptitiously

The goal of these experiments is for you to see if you can actually discover new views of reality by stripping away everything in your mind that is unproven.

To recap from the prior post:

You don’t have to believe in anything. In fact, that would bias the experiments. You have to set aside all beliefs, and suspend disbelief, in order to start.

The object of these experiments is to level set reality – you reopen your mind to the existence of all possibilities, you strip away all hidden assumptions, and then allow reality to teach you what it is, without you imposing any restrictions on it.

The reason we say you can perform these experiments surreptitiously is because there are no obvious outward manifestations. It is all going on within you. No one else knows what you are doing. You cannot lose face, so while you are still attached to that, it cannot distract you from the experiment. This is highly useful because distraction is the main means by which Acceleritis™ reduces our effectiveness. Any way distraction can get tuned down or nullified, use it, so that your entire mind is swept as if by a ring of brooms back from its diffuse expanse, into single-pointed focus.

Experiment 1: Dis-bar Assumptions

Dis-bar or dis-enfranchise, the idea here is that you will no longer automatically throw the weight of your innermost approval instantly on every thought and emotion welling up inside of yourself.

You will leave these arisings on the drafting table a little while longer so you can drink in what they are and reflect on how it is that you have these arisings of this thought or that feeling.

The first experiment therefore is to take advantage of a stolen moment in which you can do whatever you feel like in your mind, to play this game.

If you have a moment now, you can try it for a minute or for as long as you enjoy it.

Pay attention to what you are thinking and feeling and look at it as if from the outside, constructively critical.

Communicate to yourself internally that you are serious about reopening all assumptions. You mean to include reflexes, so the autonomic systems in your body know you are talking to them too. You don’t have any prior evidence whether this sort of hopeful internal communication can work or not, but your mind is open — this is an experiment. You don’t want to bias it in any way. If you sense a sarcastic smile on some face inside you, make sure it is not a bias causer.

Then you wait. The test period is 72 hours after the prescribed action.

The first manifestation will be that you catch yourself making an old assumption or reaction and some part of you calls attention to that. You then probably experience an idea cascade where one idea leads to the other so quickly it’s good to jot down one or two “trigger words” to be able to recapture each stream of thought.

It can take a lifetime to root out every last assumption hidden inside of you, yet the relief and happiness that comes each time you get rid of each single one makes the journey pleasurable and ultimately, not overly frustrating to the point of impatience.

You may find you have prejudices you thought you had utterly stamped out years ago.

You may find out you have vain reasons for jumping to some conclusions.

The list of possible self-revelations is infinite.

About 72 hours after you start, jot down any observations regarding the experiment and if you are so disposed, either anonymously or otherwise, share your observations with the rest of us as comments (see below). Make sure everyone knows which experiment you are talking about – thanks.

Experiment 2: Communicate with the Dead

You may have done this experiment before, but not as an experiment. Inside, communicate with someone who has died. “Yes, I talk to my father all the time, but I don’t know if he hears me.”

This time, realize fully that science says the jury is still out. There is voluminous anecdotal evidence for such communication being possible, and no scientific theory that rules it out except from extreme materialism which is out of fashion in modern day physics circles.

Let yourself be amazed by the realization that it is actually scientifically possible that he or she hears you, according to the latest physics thinking e.g. John Wheeler. If, as that giant and The Theory of the Conscious Universe (TTOTCU)* both posit, information is the ultimate residuum of reality, and as TTOTCU further theorizes, consciousness is that which experiences information, and energymatterspacetime is a projection of universal consciousness – if all these things turn out to be true, then your reaching out might actually connect.

To quote from Wikipedia:

“In 1990, Wheeler has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this “it from bit” doctrine, all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.[6]

Wheeler: It from bit. Otherwise put, every “it” — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. “It from bit” symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes — no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”

Note the term “participatory” – Wheeler was not as specific on the details of how we might participate in the creation as is this writer’s Theory of the Conscious Universe. Yet both of us and a whole leading generation of physicists today among other thinkers are seeing reality in a new way, which closely resembles the oldest way. They undoubtedly got there by not only thinking deeply about science and its revelations but also by going inside in ways quite similar to these experiments.

For 72 hours after the experiment (or forever) listen and look for an answering communication in everything around you and inside of you. It need not come as words in the mind. If there is an exceptional feeling, note what is in the field of your senses, e.g. a voice on the radio, movement in corner of eye and you turn to see… what? Regard your every perception as a possible communication from something or someone somewhere.

After 72 hours or so, jot down your observations, if only for yourself.

In the next post, two more experiments.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 . In the Theory of the Conscious Universe, the brain is the energy emanated by the Original mind, wound into matter, and our experience transcends dependence on the brain as we are a part of Original mind (and the whole of its experience of selfness). In modern day materialism, the mind is an energy field emanated by the brain. In ultra-behaviorism, the mind is an impotent epiphenomenon of the brain, making believe it is calling the shots but is really just along for the ride.

The mind, like a reducing valve, closes down to keep out overload. In this so far 6000-year era of Acceleritis™, there has been a lot of shutting down, when openness without commitment either way would always have been the more careful strategy.

People in the cloak of Acceleritis feel proudly that they have been properly hard-nosed when they are unconsciously trying to simplify and don’t know it, so this hard-nosed stuff is merely a rationalization. They unconsciously don’t want to consider how much scarce mental bandwidth it might take to deal with the flood of hard questions that will arise in their mind if they were to actually try to keep it open on the huge issues of life — such as what is death — is there a universal consciousness and if so is it personal or something else — who are we, each of us, what are we, why are we here, is there a point to it all?

The first moment in life that Acceleritis takes over, when we are very young, is the moment that we turn off the wonder at these questions and decide to get on with life, without realizing it we have unconsciously made a set of assumptions about the answers to those questions. Our every action is decided based on those assumptions, and every instant of our life will be shaped by those assumptions.

What if your assumptions are actually less favorable than the true conditions of reality in which you might partake?

Game Theory would posit that you are better off trying to get away with the most positive view of life you believe is conceivable, until empirical proof drives you to dial that down a bit — if that ever happens; leaving open the possibility that things could turn out to be even better than that, or simply as good as that, and you might never have to revise your assumptions downward.

Game Theory would disapprove of starting out from the most negative assumptions possible. And yet Acceleritis hugely raises the odds that an individual will tend to shoot low when making these unconscious assumptions about the nature of reality, probably normatively before age 5 in our present culture.

This is because Acceleritis increases the daily sense that we are incompetent, as compared with days of yore, those halcyon days before written language let all genies out of all bottles, in a 6000-year cascade.

Yet more genies-out-of-bottles no doubt lie ahead. So the premise of our institute is that the human race had better evolve mental emotional software to finally conquer and cure Acceleritis, if not the unthinkably enormous capacity of the human race to invent tools/weapons/media.

Acceleritis is the trance-like accommodation the human race has made for its own over-inventiveness, since written language caused our brains to rewire themselves in a way that allows us to visualize spatially at the same time as we symbolize in ever more condensed packets, enabling levels of abstraction and logic that make geometry seem like child’s play. We never had this before written language because before that we could not see communication, except for the numinosity – communicating symbols earlier hominids must have had, such as the circle, triangle, and other “magical” archetypal figures.

Numinosity for all its importance is just a feeling, whereas abstraction as potentiated in our visually-dominant primate species by seeable language, is a tool. Acceleritis is all about tools — inventions — machines — weapons — media. Our mind could not make any but the most rudimentary tools, scarcely more sophisticated than the tools made and used by other animals, until we were able to see communication. Communication being the only way that ideas can be expressed. Ideas being what drive the making of tools/inventions.

Today we receive too many question-producing stimuli each day, which causes us at an early age to shift the big questions in life off the screen of our consciousness and onto the hidden screen of our subconscious/unconscious. There, decisions/assumptions made previously constrain our body’s and conscious mind’s alternatives considerably and we are unaware of it. Like slaves, or robots of a hidden master.

Observer state is when the hidden master is exposed and the whole self is there watching itself objectively.

Flow state is when all of those parts flow into automatic harmony with one another and the individual is transported into a special state of consciousness where numinosity or miraculousness is present although the experience does not have to feel spiritual. Most people have it a few times in a lifetime playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, making love, or having a transcendent experience seemingly out of the blue.

Again these two higher states occur when Acceleritis is cured temporarily — and for more evolved human beings, permanently. The Human Effectiveness Institute sees no reason why the whole human race cannot experience these states far more often, which would lead to greater effectiveness and far greater happiness and ultimately to peace among all peoples.

We come back to the question of an open mind. What is the value of it?
Game Theory says the value of not assuming negative conditions is great, no matter what game you play. Modern psychology finds this is scientifically accurate, not just theory. Our beliefs, perceptions, assumptions, expectations, intentions and other mental emotional stuff predict the outcomes of our actions, and our scores on games. This is validated science today.

Flashback: In college majoring in philosophy and minoring in psychology I am inveigled into an experiment as a subject. More than a dozen cards are being shown, and the subject is asked to remember the sequence the cards are in. Each time you try, you are asked whether you think you will make it in 10 rounds. You go ten times to see if by the final round you can remember the whole sequence — of course the cards are shuffled each time. Turns out afterward that the actual point of the study was to compare an individual’s prediction that he or she will succeed with their true success scores. They seemed amazed that I said ten times I expected I would succeed, and that I did succeed. I asked why that was so amazing and they said no one else thought they would succeed, although nearly half did.

Acceleritis does that to our self-confidence. We of course project confidence to the degree we realized how important it was to our standing vis-à-vis other people, that if we did not show more confidence they would walk all over us.

It probably was not like this before Acceleritis.

Now about the experiments that we will undertake next week in part 2 of this post.

You don’t have to believe in anything. In fact, that would bias the experiments. You have to set aside all beliefs — suspend disbelief — in order to start.

The object of these experiments is to level set reality — you reopen your mind to the existence of all possibilities, you strip away all hidden assumptions, and then allow reality to teach you what it is, without you imposing any restrictions on it.

Of course, what these actions do in your conscious mind has less effect on your subconscious mind than on your temporary conscious mind, and all of it can flow downstream rather rapidly leaving you back in Acceleritis. However, this does not in any way mean our intentions are futile. Quite the opposite. They just take time and repetition to sink in down below the quarterdeck. But sink in they do.

You can perform these experiments surreptitiously because there are no obvious outward manifestations. It is all going on within you. No one else knows what you are doing. You cannot lose face, so while you are still attached to that, it cannot distract you from the experiment. This is highly useful because distraction is the main means by which Acceleritis reduces our effectiveness. Any way distraction can get tuned down or nullified, use it, so that your entire mind is swept as if by a ring of brooms back from its diffuse expanse, into single-pointed focus.

The stage is now set and we hope you’ll come back next week to try our incredibly easy and vitally important experiments that will help you level set your reality.

UPDATE to this post:
Watch a 3.5 minute video I made about my theory of Acceleritis.